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Uh no ?
If you're talking about worldwide sales then it's a more complex matter, fact being than every Tales of on a Nintendo platform sold better than every Tales of on others platforms (both Sony and Microsoft) outside Japan

I am talking worldwide sales, because Bandai Namco makes money from oversea releases, too. If you want to argue it's stupid to release Tales games for platforms other than PlayStation (which is the sentiment I was arguing against), worldwide view has to be considered. Moreover, I didn't say Symphonia did better on GameCube than on PS2 in Japan (it's close, but that's also thanks to the late release of the PS2-version), just that it was successful.

However, even if you are talking strictly Japan, Tales performed better on 3DS than on Vita (all Tales games for those platforms were ports / remakes, so it's equal ground) in Japan. I don't know about worldwide sales but considering Vita's state in the West, it's probably safe to assume that this also holds true in the west.

In the end my point is: The best strategy for a technically not all too demanding series like Tales where there are fans on several platforms - even if the amount of fans on PlayStation devices is higher than on other ones - would probably be to make multiplatform releases for Wii U (if it recovers somewhat), PS4, and maybe Xbone if an overseas release is planned. This is not including any money hatting into the discussion of course. You also have to remember, that JRPGs in general are not all too much tied to any specific platform, Nintendo systems at least get quite a few good JRPGs, too, so it's not a case (like the platformer genre lately) where there is simply no ground for this genre on any other platforms.

XP-39C²

MH on Consoles has done better than ever since teaming up with Nintendo. Tri is the best selling console version of any MH game. TriU on the Wii U has sold probably 300-400k worldwide and factoring userbase that's fantastic.

I think that has more to do with that the serie exploded in popularity between Monster Hunter 2 and Monster Hunter 3 rather than having something to do with Nintendo. Same thing as Monster Hunter Portable 3rd HD for PS3 selling over 400k in Japan alone, i think that has more to do with the serie popularity rather than because of the PS3.

Kinda like how MH went to 3DS. Sure the psp is what made the franchise the monster it is today but ultimately the 3DS looked like the better home for the franchise going forward and that's where it went.

Perhaps they saw thought that the 3DS would be much more successful, it's not that crazy a thought. Being able to make the game with a similar level of graphics and the back of nintendo probably helped as well.

It doesn't matter why they switched though, the point is if they think the PS4 is a better home for for MH than the wiiU they'll jump ship in a second. Right now i don't think it's that unlikely.

Banned

I am talking worldwide sales, because Bandai Namco makes money from oversea releases, too. If you want to argue it's stupid to release Tales games for platforms other than PlayStation (which is the sentiment I was arguing against), worldwide view has to be considered. Moreover, I didn't say Symphonia did better on GameCube than on PS2 in Japan (it's close, but that's also thanks to the late release of the PS2-version), just that it was successful.

However, even if you are talking strictly Japan, Tales performed better on 3DS than on Vita (all Tales games for those platforms were ports / remakes, so it's equal ground) in Japan. I don't know about worldwide sales but considering Vita's state in the West, it's probably safe to assume that this also holds true in the west.

In the end my point is: The best strategy for a technically not all too demanding series like Tales where there are fans on several platforms - even if the amount of fans on PlayStation devices is higher than on other ones - would probably be to make multiplatform releases for Wii U (if it recovers somewhat), PS4, and maybe Xbone if an overseas release is planned. This is not including any money hatting into the discussion of course. You also have to remember, that JRPGs in general are not all too much tied to any specific platform, Nintendo systems at least get quite a few good JRPGs, too, so it's not a case (like the platformer genre lately) where there is simply no ground for this genre on any other platforms.

XP-39C²

Perhaps they saw thought that the 3DS would be much more successful, it's not that crazy a thought. Being able to make the game with a similar level of graphics and the back of nintendo probably helped as well.

It doesn't matter why they switched though, the point is if they think the PS4 is a better home for for MH than the wiiU they'll jump ship in a second. Right now i don't think it's that unlikely.

Sure, i just wanted to mention that Capcom decided the next platform on a guess of which platform that would sell the most I also think that intensives/moneyhats from Nintendo also could have played a role in the platform decision.

Yeah, i think its unlikely to see a traditional console Monster Hunter game again at all.

It only would have been a gamble if Nintendo would have given up on Handhelds and the 3DS - no matter how bad it looks you know that the next handheld will be getting a new Pokemon mainline title which is able to sell at least 4 million copies. And Capcom isnt the only J-publisher who backed the 3DS at the beginning so its not like they took some kind of high risk when moving to the DS successor.

Not mentioning that Nintendo would handle most distributing and marketing of their 3DS titles in europe.

Banned

XP-39C²

It only would have been a gamble if Nintendo would have given up on Handhelds and the 3DS - no matter how bad it looks you know that the next handheld will be getting a new Pokemon mainline title which is able to sell at least 4 million copies. And Capcom isnt the only J-publisher who backed the 3DS at the beginning so its not like they took some kind of high risk when moving to the DS successor.

Not mentioning that Nintendo would handle most distributing and marketing of their 3DS titles in europe.

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However, even if you are talking strictly Japan, Tales performed better on 3DS than on Vita (all Tales games for those platforms were ports / remakes, so it's equal ground) in Japan. I don't know about worldwide sales but considering Vita's state in the West, it's probably safe to assume that this also holds true in the west.

3DS Tales was Abyss - one of the most well known Tales game and it was first time you could get it on handhelds with it's own anime.
Vita Tales are low budget 3D remakes of much smaller NDS Tales games

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3DS Tales was Abyss - one of the most well known Tales game and it was first time you could get it on handhelds with it's own anime.
Vita Tales are low budget 3D remakes of much smaller NDS Tales games

Tales of the Abyss was nothing but a simple zero effort port with no gameplay enhancements (Despite shorter loading times, it actually played worse than the original due to the worse FOV, but that might be just me), while the Vita games were full-blown remakes that drastically overhauled the original games. Abyss might be the more popular game, but dismissing its success and the failure of the Vita games just by popularity is ignoring a big chunk of what actually happened here.

Saint Titanfall

3DS Tales was Abyss - one of the most well known Tales game and it was first time you could get it on handhelds with it's own anime.
Vita Tales are low budget 3D remakes of much smaller NDS Tales games

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Tales of the Abyss was nothing but a simple zero effort port with no gameplay enhancements (Despite shorter loading times, it actually played worse than the original due to the worse FOV, but that might be just me), while the Vita games were full-blown remakes that drastically overhauled the original games. Abyss might be the more popular game, but dismissing its success and the failure of the Vita games just by popularity is ignoring a big chunk of what actually happened here.

I wouldn't say Abyss 3DS was a success...or at least I don't think Namco sees it as one considering they expected to sell 250k in Japan (which is in the Eternia PSP ballpark) and it felt short by about 100k.

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Tales of the Abyss was nothing but a simple zero effort port with no gameplay enhancements (Despite shorter loading times, it actually played worse than the original due to the worse FOV, but that might be just me), while the Vita games were full-blown remakes that drastically overhauled the original games. Abyss might be the more popular game, but dismissing its success and the failure of the Vita games just by popularity is ignoring a big chunk of what actually happened here.

Member

Tales of the Abyss was nothing but a simple zero effort port with no gameplay enhancements (Despite shorter loading times, it actually played worse than the original due to the worse FOV, but that might be just me), while the Vita games were full-blown remakes that drastically overhauled the original games. Abyss might be the more popular game, but dismissing its success and the failure of the Vita games just by popularity is ignoring a big chunk of what actually happened here.

If all DLC came tied to $13 figurines, I'd consider all DLC to be free

I wouldn't say Abyss 3DS was a success...or at least I don't think Namco sees it as one considering they expected to sell 250k in Japan (which is in the Eternia PSP ballpark) and it felt short by about 100k.

Except that it sold well above expectation in europe as stated by Baba. The game is being sold for + 50-60 here in europe and constantly sold out in in Germany. I dont know why they dont put these games on the eShop, instead of constantly leaving money on the table and forcing customer to pay the ridiculous prices.

It cant be that difficult to upload some of these games on thee Shop, when every week we have a bunch of D-Tier publisher releasing shitty retail games on the PAL eShop.

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I am talking worldwide sales, because Bandai Namco makes money from oversea releases, too. If you want to argue it's stupid to release Tales games for platforms other than PlayStation (which is the sentiment I was arguing against), worldwide view has to be considered. Moreover, I didn't say Symphonia did better on GameCube than on PS2 in Japan (it's close, but that's also thanks to the late release of the PS2-version), just that it was successful.

Yes but nowhere near the amount they make in Japan, in fact they don't make "that" much because Symphonia asides (which was published heavily promoted and bundled by Nintendo) there isn't a single episode above 200k in the US with most of them doing around 100k.
We don't have many data for Europe but the situation isn't better (from the number of worldwide sales we know that overall it's selling a bit less than in America).

Basically for a title like Xillia there will still be around 70% of the sales coming from Japan, knowing that on a Nintendo hardware their sales are halved or even worse, is it worth developping for the platform, alienating your core fanbase in Japan yet again because of an hypothetical better fanbase outside of their main country ?

Bandai Namco is a japanese company, their first task is to please the Japanese fanbase and then eventually the Western one. They made it clear recently and the only attitude we can have is "deal with it"

However, even if you are talking strictly Japan, Tales performed better on 3DS than on Vita (all Tales games for those platforms were ports / remakes, so it's equal ground) in Japan.

No this is not equal ground.
Abyss had fairly recently a popular anime series, the game was 7 years old and a generation away it's one of the most popular entry of the series and was the 10th anniversary title, moreover there was content which wasn't included in the orginal japanese release because of schedule problems (whereas the US release had those contents) that the 3DS version had.
The port was also pretty good overall with improved loading times (there's this 60fps/30fps but I don't know if it could have a significant impact on sales)

The Vita titles are shitty remakes which look ugly, the first one was a remake of the last mothership episode outsourced of Namco (it was handled by Alfa System), game wasn't great to begin with and the "remake" barely improved it.
Hearts is even worse, the remake looks uglier than the original release, it was a real mothership episode on DS and the last 2D one, it tried to mix Destiny Remake with its own spin but didn't meet a huge success because of the platform it was released on.
Its remake is full (ugly) 3D, it lack basically every appeal the original entry had and even cut contents.

In the end my point is: The best strategy for a technically not all too demanding series like Tales where there are fans on several platforms - even if the amount of fans on PlayStation devices is higher than on other ones - would probably be to make multiplatform releases for Wii U (if it recovers somewhat), PS4, and maybe Xbone if an overseas release is planned. This is not including any money hatting into the discussion of course.

Regarding the multiplatform releases I honestly don't understand why Symphonia Chronicles isn't on Wii U (I can't even imagine that they didn't think about it at some point), but for Xbox there's just no point, every gamer which wants to play a JRPG should know that it's on japanese hardwares these things happen.

So the grand total of EVERY Wii U third-party game, including Yakuza 1&2 HD, Dragon Quest X and Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, along with the other first-party games not listed like Game & Wario...is 3,044 units.

So the grand total of EVERY Wii U third-party game, including Yakuza 1&2 HD, Dragon Quest X and Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, along with the other first-party games not listed like Game & Wario...is 3,044 units.

It's actually not that bad compared with other weeks where the number was even lower.

I don't believe anyone is buying DQX right now considering the game is going to get a relaunch by the end of the month and i don't believe anyone bought Yakuza never, thought. Maybe we will see how much that game sold on famitsu top 1000... I hope.

And yesterday Splinter Cell was released. One more for the bomba bin. At least Wiiu will get a nice end of the month with Zelda. Even Epic Mickey might sell something, since the last one sold well in Japan... Not considering the fact that Epic Mickey was published by Nintendo and EM2 is published by Spike...

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So the grand total of EVERY Wii U third-party game, including Yakuza 1&2 HD, Dragon Quest X and Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, along with the other first-party games not listed like Game & Wario...is 3,044 units.

Member

I wouldn't say Abyss 3DS was a success...or at least I don't think Namco sees it as one considering they expected to sell 250k in Japan (which is in the Eternia PSP ballpark) and it felt short by about 100k.

Sorry, I meant success compared to the sales of the Vita remakes, not compared to Namco's expectations. It obviously can't be said that Abyss 3DS was a striking success. What I disagree with is first and foremost the notion of making up excuses for the weak sales of the Vita Tales games, while trying to paint Abyss 3DS as an underperformer. That seems to me a rather biased position, since it's definitely a more complex story than "version of a more popular game" and "versions of less popular games". You can't ignore that Abyss 3DS was a zero effort port (released during the 3DS's darkest time too) that looked and played actually worse than the original version, while the Vita games were remade from the ground up and were more than likely more expensive in development than Abyss 3DS, but still failed to sell a decent amount of copies. There was no reason to pick up Abyss 3DS other than being able to play it on the go, while there were plenty of reasons to pick up the remakes (even though the Hearts remake is a tragedy).

This is not saying that Abyss's sales were good (you just need to look at Eternia PSP's sales to know that that's not the case), but one-sidedly implying Abyss sold bad for what it was, and ToH/ToI sold okay for what they are seems silly to me.

I also don't agree that Tales of the Abyss would have had to sell better because of an anime series that was already three years old the time of release. That's rather ancient.

They wouldnt have released it in europe if their had 0 expectations for it, even if its that case it doesnt change the fact that it sold above their expectations with no marketing or localization efforts.

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It's actually not that bad compared with other weeks where the number was even lower.

I don't believe anyone is buying DQX right now considering the game is going to get a relaunch by the end of the month and i don't believe anyone bought Yakuza never, thought. Maybe we will see how much that game sold on famitsu top 1000... I hope.

And yesterday Splinter Cell was released. One more for the bomba bin. At least Wiiu will get a nice end of the month with Zelda. Even Epic Mickey might sell something, since the last one sold well in Japan... Not considering the fact that Epic Mickey was published by Nintendo and EM2 is published by Spike...

The reason why I brought it up is because every week since Pikmin 3, the proportion of third-party sales in relation to total software sales has been incredibly diminished; at the same time, first-party sales have been dominating, relatively speaking.

While Wii U software sales are up overall, it's disheartening to see Nintendo completely dominate the entire software arena. When third-parties get the idea that only Nintendo games can sell on Nintendo platforms, that's when they decide not to support it.

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They wouldnt have released it in europe if their had 0 expectations for it, even if its that case it doesnt change the fact that it sold above their expectations with no marketing or localization efforts.

But they did have 0 expectation, the game was here to say to the fanbase "here it is we're localizing Tales again" before Graces F, localization cost must have been fairly low, all they had to do was to change the size of the typography and a few adjustments here and there

I think by the "above their expectations" your source must be this statement

Taking in consideration the lack of translation and advertising, Tales of the Abyss actually sold unexpectedly fast and well, and they had to print copies of the game again three or four times. This is encouraging for Namco and should lead to more Tales games being localized in the future.

Being the one who talked about this matter with the Bamco representative I can tell you that they had 0 expectation, they just printed a few hundreds copies by countries and had to do it three or four times because they didn't expect that with 0 marketing there were thousands of players willing to play a Tales not even translated in their mother tongue
I was just answering you because the way you said it, it looks like the game was a success and sold well. It did sold above their expectations, but I don't think it's fair to just summarize the sales with such a sentence, unless you say precisely what the aforementioned "expectations" were.

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MH on Consoles has done better than ever since teaming up with Nintendo. Tri is the best selling console version of any MH game. TriU on the Wii U has sold probably 300-400k worldwide and factoring userbase that's fantastic.

Actually, I seem to recall that MH3 had been overshipped and that its prices dropped pretty quickly. Although considering MH4, it makes more sense to think that Capcom's retreated from releasing original Monster Hunter titles for home consoles because of their performance rather than that they desire to move back to PlayStation.

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Mages. (5pb.) has one title for the Xbone in development, by the former Cave director of development (Asada Makoto? I can't read names at all.). To be revealed soon (maybe another TGS period announcement).

Way OT, but as someone currently learning mandarin and who was told that a lot of japanese characters come from the chinese characters and that I would have an easier time learning Japanese after I learned Mandarin, I'm a little distraught :/

Actually, I seem to recall that MH3 had been overshipped and that its prices dropped pretty quickly. Although considering MH4, it makes more sense to think that Capcom's retreated from releasing original Monster Hunter titles for home consoles because of their performance rather than that they desire to move back to PlayStation.

I think it's a little disingeneous to believe the reason MHTri sold better than other console iterations is due to the partnership with Nintendo. IMHO it has everything to do with the popularity of the franchise at the time as opposed to its popularity when it was released on PS2.

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While Wii U software sales are up overall, it's disheartening to see Nintendo completely dominate the entire software arena. When third-parties get the idea that only Nintendo games can sell on Nintendo platforms, that's when they decide not to support it.